June 17, 2009

For the June 20 screening we have the rare privilege of screenings two related films back to back; as their maker prefers: Travis Wilkerson’s documentary-essay An Injury to One and it’s fictional companion Who Killed Cock Robin? (Redux). The first investigates Butte Montana’s history; the second, that history’s resonance in the present landscape.

An Injury to One
An experimental documentary exploring the turn-of-century lynching of union organizer Frank Little in mining town of Butte, Montana.
&
Who Killed Cock Robin? (Redux)
An experimental narrative about a young man living in Butte, Montana whose life echoes that of Butte’s (and America’s) industrial decline.

Excerpt-Travis Wilkerson: “The starting point would be to look at Butte and to see that Butte is a place that we constructed. Because there’s a sense when people come to the town, because the devastation is so widespread—you come over this hill and there’s this gaping hole, the pit looks as if it were two-thirds of the size of the entire city. In fact, it isn’t, but it feels that way. And everywhere you look are these big things that are gouged out, there are tailings everywhere. It’s a place that people going on vacations in Montana try to avoid or pass through as quickly as possible.

One of the things that drew me to it was the desire to say, look, this is not an act of God. This is a human act. We destroyed this town. Well, I didn’t, but some people did. And there’s a reason for it.”

Excerpt:
Scope: How does this, your first fiction film, relate to your documentary, An Injury to One?Travis Wilkerson: “The title itself is a reference to Injury. I was in Butte talking to [musician/actor] Charlie Parr and he told me that Cock Robin was Frank Liddle. The starting point was, what are the consequences of those things that happened? The way the companies pillaged, plundered, and ultimately abandoned the town. The decision to move into fiction—well, I don’t see them as separate. But Injury is obviously to a great extent about the history, and I wanted to make a richer, truer portrait of where Butte is now, with that film serving as a kind of contextualiser. Ideally, they would be shown together as companion pieces.”

June 12, 2009

An extraordinary meditation on the nature of democratic progress in the United States, John Gianvito’s one-of-a-kind documentary journeys from the gravesites to the public markers that document the people and incidents that make up over 400 years of struggle against economic oppression. Mesmerizingly shot and edited with a dramatically mounting pace, PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND is both a fascinating history lesson and a jolting rumination on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. (Source: Koch Entertainment Distribution)

Link: http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs32/int_sicinski_gianvito.html
Excerpt from interview linked above –
John Gianvito: After September 11, 2001, “I found myself re-reading stretches of Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’, re-encountering some measure of what is admirable in this country’s past, the words and deeds of so many, known and unknown, who contributed to the historical struggle for a more just and egalitarian society. In time the idea took root to pay homage to this significant history, as well as to this book which continues to mean so much to so many of us, and by so doing, the hope was to draw sustenance from the sacrifices and efforts of those who came before us. ‘Profit Motive and the whispering wind’ was intended to be a small poem to this progressive past.”

When Alexis proposed screening my film to you folks this evening, I was honored that he wished to do so and at the same time apprehensive about how such an odd film might play in Manila. Not that I think audiences in the Philippines have any particular aversion to odd films, especially since some of the most wonderfully strange films I’ve seen in recent years have come from your country. It is more the issue that my film concentrates on a spectrum of American history that the majority of folks I encounter in the United States know little about. While you are likely to feel terribly frustrated that you are being presented with a succession of names and events that few of you may recognize, it is important to understand that this experience is not so different here in the US. But my film is not actually a history lesson, at least not in the traditional ways in which we tend to think about pedagogical films. Instead I thought of myself as writing a kind of poem about this history. My initial inspiration was the desire to pay tribute to a book that has meant a great deal to so many of us on the political left in the US, a book by renowned historian and activist Howard Zinn entitled “A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.” What this book attempts to do is to tell a version of the history of the US from the arrival of Columbus up until the present, but from the perspective of those who are traditionally left out of the standard textbooks. Instead of focusing as always on the lives of the Presidents and industrialists, the robber barons and the generals, Zinn writes about the struggles and deeds of America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. But, as always in his work, Zinn’s emphasis is not about merely recounting the details of the past but consistently Zinn focuses our understanding upon what that past means to the present and how this knowledge, so much of it suppressed and kept out of view, can be used to guide us forward. As Zinn says, “writing about history is never a neutral act.”

As will soon become apparant, my film is a very meditative work (“meditative” if one is into the film, “boring” if one rejects it). In a certain sense, I have come to think that I have only made 50% of this movie. The other 50% is made–or not made–by what you do with the contemplative space the film provides you.

For those who will say that this is a meaningless film, at least meaningless to audiences in the Philippines, I would simply say that if I had grown up in a country that had the US’s foot on its throat my whole life, I personally would be interested in knowing that there exists another US inside the America we all think we know, an America committed to the eternal struggle to forge a more just and egalitarian society. And if you don’t think of the United States as having had its foot on your throat than this is itself proof of the suppression of history.

Finally, as my film suggests, and as I believe, we are all, in fact, surrounded by the dead. And they have things to tell us.

I dedicate tonight’s screening to the future memory of Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto, Macario Sakay, and all the other “bandoleros” of the spirit.

June 6, 2009

In 1926, a sixteen-year-old boy hopped his first train from Oklahoma to California, beginning a ten-year odyssey marked by life-changing experiences. He kept his stories from those Depression years to himself until the eve of his death, when he made a tape recording for posterity.

Seventy-five years after that first train ride, his grandson would set out with that tape and a 16mm camera, looking for echoes of those experiences in the modern landscape. ‘Last Thoughts’ is an impressionistic tour of the American West, past and present, guided by the voice of a dying hobo.

May 23, 2009

Movie icon Bembol Roco walks the mean streets of Manila as “Kontra Madiaga,” a character invented by combining the actor’s two most celebrated performances: innocent country bumpkin Julio Madiaga from 1975’s Manila in the Claws of Light and death-squad leader Commander Kontra of 1989’s Fight for Us. Haunted by memories of loss assembled from snippets from these and other Lino Brocka films, Kontra’s soul is long dead from butchering resistance fighters, but the Madiaga part of him continues to search Orpheus-like for the girl for whom he came to the capital. Shot from the hip in a single day and shot through with video-quotes from film history, this is conceptual minimalism povera at its most politically edgy. (Olaf Möller, European Editor, Film Comment (New York), “23 films to look out for this 2009″)

May 16, 2009

The passage of man’s life from childhood to old age presents itself through a series of monologues elicited from kids, teenagers, young parents, an elderly couple, an almost senile man, etc. It’s humble, often radically artless, solely concerned with the freedom of its narrators and their silences as much as their insights, their hopes, fears, and dreams. It’s a bridge from the 21st century back to the 19th, constructed from human experiences. (Olaf Möller, Film Comment)

I am happy to know that my little film has found it’s way to you. To the children of some of the greatest cineastes of the world!

Today a film can travel very fast and everywhere at the same time but to truly travel, to be able to reach the hearts it encounters and to settle there in many new homes it needs bridges. These bridges are people that bring cinema as a special gift to other people, with their love and understanding they prepare the souls of the viewers so that there is every chance for a true connection.

Knowing that my friend Alexis is bringing my film to you makes this travel of Letter to a Child very special. The success of a film cannot be measured, not by awards not even by history. It’s purpose remains a secret, locked in (many or few) people’s hearts. With this special bridge that brings my film and you together, I believe it’s purpose will be revealed in you.

We are strangers in paradise, not only to each other but also to ourselves. In this lies the terror of beauty, like our friend Rilke says. And there was one other thought that illuminated my way of making this film; almost forgotten Slovenian writer Milan Pugelj wrote some 100 years ago in one short story this simple, wonderful sentence, a revelation: Only what we feel in our heart is the truth.

May 9, 2009

When Timawa Meets Delgado
Directed by Ray Defante Gibraltar
Photographed and Produced by Oscar Nava
Poetry by J.I.E. Teodoro

Championed by many (Jessica Zafra and Raya Martin included), but with a modest number of screenings so far, When Timawa Meets Delgado is one of the most original and refreshing local films produced in the last half decade. The topic of the Illongo feature (written, directed, and edited by Ray Defante Gibraltar) is nursing, but that isn’t quite what it’s about. It’s both a comedy and a delirious essay-film, precise and elusive, concrete and poetic. A hybrid of documentary and fiction that wears its subjectivity on its sleeve, it balances humour and intelligence, wit and sincerity like few Filipino films have.

January 21, 2009

Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna Ng Bahaghari?(aka Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow)
Directed by a Kidlat Tahimik

Kidlat Tahimik’s rarely screened 3-hour diary film Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari (aka Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow) is equal parts dialogue between father and son, and document of a long turbulent period in Philippine history; as well as perhaps the best film he has made to date.

It is long, one might think, but not if one considers the span of years it covers: 1981-1993; events it captures: Ninoy’s death, People Power rallies and Cory’s Presidency; and places it takes you: from Baguio to Monument Valley and New York, from Manila to Germany.